Dave Naffziger's Blog

Me, I ran it 4:42 (134 of 429 runners). I’m actually pleased with the time -but it was a pretty brutal run (the winner’s PR is 2:35). My knee didn’t bother me – the soft trail helped.

The runners tend to be older (there were more runners aged 50-54 than 30-34), and were way more experienced. A few of the standout runners I met:

• a man that was running his 95th marathon (he’s run 26 NYC marathons),
• a woman that ran 16 marathons in 16 months and
• of course I ran with Jeff, a friend that is pursuing the 50+1 (he’s 15 states and 22 marathons into it).

My first trail marathon and first real trail run. The varying terrain was pretty, challenging and engaging – it took my full attention to avoid the many buried roots, rocks and divots. The area had received a full ten inches of rain in the prior two days, and the awful weather scared off a full 20% of the registered runners. The result was many stream crossings and countless mud hazards. Both Jeff and I threw away our sneakers after this race – they were just so muddy and gnarled that it didn’t make sense to take them home. However, race day was gorgeous (but cold at the start) and around mid-day temperatures were in the low 40s and the sky was perfectly clear.

The conditions definitely slowed the race from its already long pace. The winners in the prior years ran around 3:05. The 2004 runner also ran the race and came in 12 minutes slower this year.

This quote from Dean Karnazes was on the back of the T-shirts:

Hardcore. That’s the best way to describe today’s marathon. Along with the 3,500 feet of climbing, most of the course was on technical single-track trail, with numerous stream crossings, hordes of logs and branches to climb over and navigate around, deep pocket of mud, slippery rocks, and gnarled tree roots hiding silently under thick canopies of fallen leaves.

The Tecumseh Marathon was the slowest of his 50 marathons (and he ran with better conditions). He does a much better job describing the run than I could on his longer blog post.

I was fairly disappointed with the official results on the web, so I tossed them into excel and added a few more useful stats (percentiles mostly) and merged them with the very interesting ‘tidbit’ info from the entry list. I then tested Excel’s “save as a web page” functionality and was reasonably impressed with the results. The html was even fairly clean. Here is my mashed up version of the Tecumseh Trail Marathon results, and a quick graph of the age distribution.

Our shoes: